Mavis Gallant

“I’m forced to say that it seems very unsatisfying to me, and simply no story at all, if the ending is to be left so far in the air,” a New Yorker editor wrote in an internal memo about Mavis Gallant’s 1961 story “Two Questions.” (Between 1951 and 1995, Gallant, who died last week, at the age of ninety-one, published a hundred and sixteen stories in this magazine.) “Seems to me that something should be completed, or it’s just a long sketch. . . . It’s like life, and not—to me—like fiction.” William Maxwell, Gallant’s editor, replied, “The older I get the more grateful I am not to be told how everything comes out.”

It’s that quality—Gallant’s “like-lifeness,” her unresolved presentness—that makes her stories sit so solidly, almost bad-naturedly, in memory. They have come to dinner, and, no matter how late the hour, you just can’t show them to the door. You’re haunted both by the moments of beauty and intelligence and by the scenes of devastating loneliness or disappointment. Haunted, too, by the details of her biography that informed so much of her experience, fictional and otherwise: being left at a boarding school at the age of four (“The only thing I remember,” she said, “is my mother putting me on a chair and saying, ‘I’ll be back in ten minutes.’ She just didn’t come back”); not being told of her father’s death until several years after the fact; deciding to give up a job as a journalist in Montreal and move to Europe alone, in her late twenties; her subsequent months of penniless hunger in Spain (while her literary agent pocketed her earnings); or her lacerating observations of the 1968 student uprisings in Paris, in which no one gets away unexamined.

There’s an unapologetic tone to most of Gallant’s stories, and also to the stories about her. She didn’t apologize for wanting to write at a time when women, Canadian women, as Alice Munro has documented, were not expected to put themselves forward. She didn’t apologize for leaving Canada—and leaving her homeland forever in a quandary about the extent to which it could claim her. She lived most of her life as a foreigner, in France, childless and husbandless. (An early marriage ended when she was twenty-five.) Had she lived another way, she wouldn’t have been the writer that she was. But it’s easy to underestimate how difficult these decisions may have been for her. In a 1960 diary, she recorded a conversation with a friend, who told her:

“You want to put yourself in a box. . . . Is that the life you want? . . . Do you want every day to be just like the next? Now you are free. You haven’t a man—that is, you haven’t a man to betray you, to cheat you, and to take all your money. Install yourself in your new apartment, have all the adventure you like, but never allow any man to spend more than two evenings consecutively there.” I kept saying, “But what is to become of me?” “Nothing. You are a writer. Why do you want to be anything else? . . . Why do you want to be anything but Mavis?” he asked.

Gallant was sometimes unforgiving, but also compassionate toward the characters she inhabited. I came to her as a reader years before I had any idea that I might one day know her. For a young woman, reading secondhand copies of the collections “From the Fifteenth District” and “Home Truths” was a revelation. Gallant’s characters were so interior one had the sense that they were almost trapped inside their own minds, peering outward through two circles of light. The degree of self-knowledge was painful, the understanding of the moods and motivations of others astonishing, but the moments of real connection heartbreakingly rare. There was isolation, and then there was the acceptance of isolation.

Gallant was also, and ever, funny. Writing, she told The Paris Review, is “like a love affair: the beginning is the best part.” In an early letter to Maxwell, she joked, “I have another [story] nearly ready, but it is about children, and I wonder if you haven’t had enough of that from me. (1) Yes (2) No (3) Undecided (4) Never heard of Eisenhower.” The one time I met Gallant in person, in 2006, she was hunched and crippled by osteoporosis, but she skewered two people I knew with such startling and sly precision that I was speechless for a moment, thinking I’d misunderstood. But Gallant’s vision is not, generally, a satirical one; it isn’t calculated for effect. She is simply honest. In early 2004, she wrote to me, “I don’t believe any of us shed tears of nostalgia over 2003, which began with threats and ended with an earthquake. For 2004, I wish you not just une Bonne Année but une Année Meilleure—brighter and truthful.” Truthful, it seems to me, is one of the best things that can be said about her writing. Truthful—and like life.

In 1957, Gallant recorded a dream in her diary: “This is a comic dream. I dream that people keep dying in my apartment and I keep shoving them in a trunk. I keep going about to friends saying plaintively, ‘What is one supposed to do with a lot of cadavers?’ ” We all know what she did with those cadavers—the people she dreamed up, assessed, dissected, described, and, with a sometimes exacting eye, loved. Her particular science was both autopsy and resurrection. ♦

This article appears in the print edition of the March 3, 2014, issue.

Deborah Treisman is The New Yorker’s fiction editor and the host of its Fiction Podcast.

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